


Them

by Slyboots



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: 1950s, Alternative Perspective, Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Extremely Underage, Gen, Horror, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Rare Fandoms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-11
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-03 21:28:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4115533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyboots/pseuds/Slyboots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"A kid could drown out here."</p>
<p>The killing season of 1957-8 left an indelible mark on the boys and girls of Derry--those lucky enough to survive it.</p>
<p>They were eleven at the time, eleven verging on twelve. They were bad little boys, on the whole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Great Before

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Slasheretta](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Slasheretta).



> Written for Angie, who got me into the IT fandom. A number of her Patrick headcanons made their way into this fic.
> 
> Felt like the bullies warranted more character development than King gave them. Tried to mimic some aspects of King’s style here.

More than any hard-on or newspaper route, fear bakes a boy solid. Fear of oblivion, fear of irrelevance: fear that your son will walk cocksure and sunny-faced as your own back bends limp as your prick. Fear of change, in the world and in the self—  
Who, after all, having seen the dry cliffs on the other side of that indefinable valley, _really_ wants to be grown-up?  
For the boys of Derry, Maine, that valley was gouged sure and true by the events of 1958. Gouged and baked solid.  
On one side of this gouge lay the autumn of 1957. On the other lay—what? Manhood. For all—sooner or later, for all the boys of Derry, Maine—the stony shitty stink of death.  
On the other lay _real_ fear. Fear that trickles down your throat and freezes in your balls, fear that says _ha-ha on you_ to your nervy childhood imaginings—  
Fear of It.  
Fear of the boogeyman. At eleven, they had not quite stopped believing in the boogeyman.  
Eleven. Nearly twelve. An age of miracles, in a miraculous year.

And before—  
Well, who gave a fuck about the Great Before?

“Getcha ass out here, Reginald,” bawled Gene Huggins as the rain pissed down and the Canal bellied up. Belch, who scarce answered to Reginald—  
—who would scarce have noticed, unwelcome truth be told, if his old man had called him Debbie Reynolds—  
—lingered at the window.  
“Getcha ass _down_ here. We’re laying sandbags.”  
“Listen to your father, Reg,” said his mother from the corner. “Get a move on.”  
The house was dark, and stank of rising water. Outside, men with iron-beam shoulders and sturdy faces—real solid guys, on the whole—hauled sand.  
Belch shook himself. Hustled.

“Shit, shit, fuck, shit—”  
Such was the holy litany of Victor Criss.  
_(shit Henry don’t do it)_  
He pulled his jacket—which was not leather yet, although within the year it would be replaced—over his soaked scalp. Ran, so goes the expression, like wet shit, pounding down a sidewalk the color of bird-turd.  
His funnybook flapped under his arm. Dracula’s face peeled—  
_(old boy’s got a bad sunburn)_  
—shedding rain and cheap ink. It had been half his allowance.  
In the low blue stormlight, he looked rather like Eddie Kaspbrak.  
Not big yet—and lacking all those silent gifts that bigness bestows.  
Cursing, hunched and shivering, Victor scuttled home.

Peter Gordon slept, as much as possible, through the storm.

History, even that withered brand of local gossip that in Derry passes for history, does not record what Moose Sadler did during the storm of ‘57, or for many months after.

The Kenduskeag swelled like a running sore.

A bird, nearly dead, thrashed in the gutter. Plucked feathers floated around. In bare patches it was the sober pinky-red of a chewed wad of Juicy Fruit, and its eyes bubbled up under thin lids.  
Patrick Hockstetter watched with healthy interest.  
Through the closed window the set clicked and spat. Ed Sullivan stuttered.  
Of this Patrick took no notice at all.  
His hands clenched and unclenched. Curls of wet skin remained under his clean nails.  
_(guy could drown o a kid could drown out here)_  
In this he did not include himself.  
He sloshed from foot to galoshed foot. His thoughts then were too large and shapeless to fit into words—  
His healthy eleven-year-old hard-on pressed numbly into his belly.  
He stepped forward.  
Patrick’s thoughts shrank to a hot point. Winked out.  
He stepped back.  
Little eddies rose and fell in the gutter. On one of these eddies floated the bird’s tangled guts.  
He stared.  
Stared, and did not think much.  
_(my pants)_  
For a while he stood there, with hot  
( _piss_?)  
hot something running down his leg. Afterward, he went inside and changed his trousers, and that was where his mother found him.


	2. Ava Hockstetter Spins a Yarn

A crinkled blanket sat on her lap like something dead. She knitted it while she spoke.  
“You have to promise me you’ll listen.”  
Her needles clicked, a comforting rosary-bead click.  
“Listen hard, all right?”  
Outside the floodwaters chugged away. Wet concrete winked in the half-light. The carnival-glass lamp colored both their faces a drowned mucusy blue.  
“Okay, Mom,” said Patrick.  
Ava swallowed, a sourness on her tongue now. Patrick watched her with mild forgiving eyes.  
“I don’t want you hanging around outside anymore.”  
For an instant she thought—  
 _(she had always thought)  
_ —she saw something in his slack heavy face. She blinked, fearing tears.  
“It’s not safe out there. Do you understand me, Patrick?”  
 _(lights are on but nobody home)  
_ He nodded.  
 _(nobody home but)  
_ At that last but her mind clamped down. Ava’s needles clicked and clacked.  
“Do you?”  
He nodded again.  
Ava hitched up the blanket on her lap. Fear-sweat or condensation trickled into her collar.  
“There was—” She paused. “Someone kidnapped a little boy today—”  
A little boy who would have been, give or take a few insignificant months, very close to Avery’s age. But this, too, she pushed aside into the dark places.  
“Did he die?” said Patrick—  
—he might have been a corpse, slumped and fishy-eyed, white as pus, hair still thick with rain and embalmers’ pomade (not fashionable, no, but almost so)—  
— _did he die,_ she thought, a mad shuddery thought. _What a question_.  
So it was carefully that she lied, “Well, we don’t know yet. He was hurt very badly. But the doctors said he might be okay, you understand me?”  
“Oh,” said Patrick.  
 _They think,_ Mrs. Straub had said, _they think it’s a sex crime. Of course, nobody really knows, do they? Whatever it was—_  
But she would not trouble Patrick, slow and baby-faced and innocent, still her baby, with that.  
 _(what would he do with it)  
_ “But the man who did it, well, they didn’t catch him, Patrick. He could be anybody. Anybody at all.”  
Unexpectedly he caught her meaning, as if she’d snagged something drifting inside him. “I’ll be careful, Mom. Really careful. You know me.”  
 _(no)  
_ The water outside withdrew with a lazy growl. _Knit one_ , she thought fiercely, _purl two_.  
“Well, okay. But—”  
 _Knit one.  
_ “You have to be extra-careful. No wandering around without your friends, okay? Come right home after school.”  
He regarded her.  
 _Purl two.  
_ She might then have burst into tears.  
 _(but not in front of Patrick never in front of Patrick)  
_ _(never again)  
_ “Keep yourself safe,” said Ava. “For the Lord’s sake—”  
 _(St. Felicity, St. Susanna, all you patrons of lost sons)_  
“Keep yourself safe.”  
He did not, she thought as the clouds broke up and the light shifted, as the carnival-glass lamp’s bulb flickered and dimmed, look quite like a child anymore.

In the end, she let him go. Another hour under Patrick’s sad gaze seemed all at once intolerable.  
He kissed his mother on the cheek, and she buttoned his jacket (”I can do it, Mom, it’s okay”), and she waved him goodbye. The cold descended as she stood, watching, until he was out of sight.  
With a hand on her belly she went in. While the Jell-O salad set, Ava Hockstetter knitted a baby blanket.

Patrick doubled back.  
“I’ll be careful, Mom,” he murmured. It sounded half-sacred.  
Patrick did not pray at night.

The refrigerator stood almost ankle-deep in stinking piss-water. The door opened.  
The door closed.  
He waited until the scratching ceased, and for some time after.

By this time Ava had called her friend Myrna Elman. They commiserated, as mothers will, and consoled each other for the loss of children not yet dead.  
Myrna hung up first, and passed the story of the Denbrough boy to a Mrs. Sonia Kaspbrak (a friend of Ava’s in Jesus). Sonia sat her son Eddie down—  
—but not before phoning Eleanor Dunton.  
By this time-honored method all of the mothers in Derry—  
—or all the brave and good and conscientious mothers, a much smaller number—  
—knew by eight-o-clock how George Denbrough had died.

(Oscar Bowers would not hear the story for days, and then only from his son.)

“You can’t keep boys tied down,” Ava whispered to her husband that night. “Sooner or later those apron strings—well, they strangle. You don’t want a Molly for a son, do you? Not some sissy—”  
“You want a living son?” Mr. Hockstetter rolled over. His jizzum  
( _careful_ , he’d said, _the baby_ )  
trickled down between them.  
“Well, I scared him a little.” Above the bed a fly buzzed and scraped and sawed away. Ava turned her damp face to the damp pillow. “Maybe not enough.”  
“Boys that age don’t scare easy.”  
( _Patrick doesn’t_ )  
“There are a lot of kids in Derry,” said Ava after a moment.  
He sucked in breath.  
( _but o the odds_ )  
Her hand found her belly, unwholesomely flat.  
“I miss Avery,” she said.  
“Go to sleep, Ava.”  
“I tried,” she said. “I tried.”

At this moment Patrick lay in bed, peacefully dreamless.

_O Lord,_ thought Ava, _You don’t make it easy, keeping them safe. And they don’t, either._  
And as she drifted:

_O Lord help me, I love him, I love him desperately, but—_

A letter from the Derry municipal police went round at Derry Elementary School the next day.  
Ava Hockstetter never received it. In this she was not alone.


End file.
